New 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros Powered by M1 Pro and M1 Max Chips

I also noticed. I think MagSafe 3 is electrically a USB charge port, so it might not be compatible with MagSafe 1 and 2, which don’t involve any USB PD protocol exchanges.

Just ordered the top of the line (to replace my top-of-the-line 15" mid 2015) and the shipping is supposed to be 11/18–11/26.

I was also encouraged by seeing the price for that mentioned here agreed with what I found, as that meant I didn’t rush through and forget something.

Here’s Anandtech’s breakdown of the new processors.

It sounds like a fully decked out MacBook Pro with the M1 Max can beat almost any desktop system.

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Sorry if I’m being repetitive here. Just trying to nail this point down.

My current MacBook Pro, a late 2013 retina 13 inch, is 8 years old now. It has 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD, which isn’t even enough to hold my Photos library anymore. That resides on an external SSD, but doesn’t get backed up by Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner. This Mac will also not upgrade to Monterey.

So yesterday morning I took a leap and ordered a new MacBook Pro. I went with 32 GB RAM (I have lots of apps open all the time and have noticed some lagging), and 2 TB SSD. But I went with the lowest CPU: 8-core CPU / 14-core GPU.

If I had gone with 10-core CPU / 16-core GPU at the end of the calculation it would have cost me about $340 more. And I just didn’t see a reason to do that.

Delivery is expected in 8-10 business days. I can still change I guess, if there was a compelling reason to do so. But it sort of felt not really necessary. I don’t do high-res video editing for example.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

I ordered as soon as our Business rep got back to me and the expected delivery is Nov 16-23. I’ve occasionally had things arrive early but I’m not hopeful. She said they had been extremely busy with orders flying in for all models.

I only spoke to her as there was a glitch in the online pricing. I built the machine I wanted and it was $4049 AUD. I added it to the cart but it displayed there as $4226 (both prices before Aus GST). She got back to me to say there was some sort of issue with the pricing on the web site but assured me the higher price was correct. I was then left to explain to my wife why it was more expensive than I’d told her :slight_smile:

5 posts were split to a new topic: Backing up external drives

Well the 32GB RAM upgrade is quite expensive. You could pay for the 10/16 core M1 Pro upgrade and have money left over if you opted for 16 GB RAM instead. If you’re planning on keeping this Mac for a long time, I would do both. Personally, after all I’ve seen from M1 so far, I would wager more cores will render better performance than RAM in excess of 16 GB for most workflows.

[Full disclosure, I did get 32 GB myself since IMHO on a $3600 MBP, $400 really doesn’t tilt the scales a whole lot anymore.]

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What kind of work flows are helped by the upgraded CPU?

I am interested in a high end 27" iMac to replace my old 27" iMac, which can no longer be upgraded to the current and future macOS. I am not interested in having a conglomeration of MacBook, display screen, larger keyboard cluttering my work desk.

Video in particular, since the M1 Max has two video encode engines and two ProRes engines, whereas the M1 Pro has only one of each. The M1 Max also has twice the GPUs which will help graphic-intensive tasks. But since they have the same 10-core CPU, those tasks won’t be much different.

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That’s what I did. Replacing a 2015 MBP and replaced my wife’s 2013 MBA when the M1 MBA arrived on scene. 16 would really be plenty as would have been the lower processor…but we can afford it so I upgraded both. Didn’t bother with the Max though. My son ordered the Max because he thinks it will make his Stream games faster…don’t believe that’s true…but you know how millennials are, us geezers don’t know anything. Told him it was more likely his internet speed…but whatever. I got the 14 strictly for the bigger screen than the Air and the lighter weight than the 16 for traveling with it…if it didn’t travel would have most likely got the 16.

Additional CPU cores will help with work flows that are massively multithreaded (FYI, Activity Monitor will show you how many threads your apps actually run under load). That’s why for me the 10/16 core Pro was the obvious choice.

The benefit of going to M1 Max is mainly graphics. It’s got more GPU cores, it has twice the mem b/w (on top of what is already a quite staggering 200 GB/s), and it has one extra encode engine. Since the only video I do is watch movies, I know the Max is overkill for me. Fortunately so, since it shaves at least $400 off my bill and it means my MBP will arrive two weeks earlier. :wink:

I liked the Spider-Man reference.

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What do you use your Mac for?

I truly believe that 8Gb of memory is plenty for about 95% of the customers.

This may seem strange. What if you have a ton of open apps? What if you have a lot of tabs open on Safari? What if you stream video while browsing browsing Facebook?

Apple has spent the last fifteen years perfecting the iPhone operating system. Even the most powerful recent iPhone only has 6Gb of memory, yet it has no problems with performance. It has less memory than the most powerful Samsung phone, but can easily put perform it.

There are two secrets: one is that Apple has an extremely fast bus to move files from SSD storage into memory. The other is that Apple is able with its silicon chip to develop a highly efficient way of moving unneeded bits of programs in and out of memory. This couldn’t be done under an Intel chip. With Intel, the entire program is either in memory or not. With Apple Silicon, only a stub of the program has to be in memory.

I’ve mentioned this video comparing the 8Gb MacBook Pro to a 16Gb MacBook Pro before. If you watch that video, you will see the 16Gb Mac using more than 8Gb of memory for a test. You’ll see the 8Gb Mac with just a few hundred kilobytes of free memory while the 16Gb one still has several gigabytes free. Yet, that 8Gb Mac finishes almost every task within seconds of the 16Gb model. The only task where the 8Gb fails is the final one where a file larger than 8Gb is being created. The 16Gb Mac can hold the entire file in memory. The 8Gb Mac cannot.

If these were Intel based machines, the 8Gb Mac could not keep up. If this was an OS other than an Apple OS, the 8Gb Mac would have been left in the dust. An Intel Mac with 8Gb gets overwhelmed easily. Even a power user can overwhelm a 16Gb Intel Mac. You must have 32Gb.

However, this is far from true on Apple Silicon running an Apple OS. It’s a new world we have to get use to.


Back in 1966, I went into a Ford dealership with my dad to buy a new car. There in the center of the showroom was a red Mustang Fastback. It was the coolest car I’d ever seen.

Of course, Dad being a dad, went for the “practical” and bought a Ford Falcon. The Mustang had a 289 cubic inch V8 and it could move. The Falcon had a 200 cubic inch inline 6 and I could out run it. The Mustang had a bigger engine. Therefore, it was faster.

A few years ago, I bought a VW GTI. It has a 2.0 liter engine. That’s only 120 cubic inches. Yet, this GTI can easily out perform that Mustang. How could a car with an engine 40% smaller than that anaemic Falcon blaze so fast?

Technology. My GTI can use the little displacement it has with high efficiency. And get way better gas mileage in the process.

That’s the difference between the M1 based Mac and the Intel based Mac. That Intel chip is based on the 80386 that came out in 1985. That x86-32 bit architecture became the basis of the x86-64 which plagues Intel to this day. The way x86 handles virtual memory is highly inefficient.

It didn’t matter when you’re taking about desktops plugged into a 20Amp wall socket. There’s plenty of power! Just use more juice and RAM.

It became an issue when your computer fits in your pocket. It’s why Apple started to make its own silicon. It’s why it was lucky that Mac OS X which became the basis of the phone’s operating system was based upon the Mach kernel (although the OS wasn’t fully a micro kernel).

Making its own silicon allowed Apple to make something that was much more efficient. The architecture of the OS allowed Apple to handle what little memory there was with absolute efficiency.

So, it gets back what you’re doing with your Mac. If you’re rendering animation, you need all that power and GPU. You need a massive amount of memory just to hold the frame you’re rendering. Otherwise, you just don’t need 16Gb, 32Gb, and 64Gb of memory any more than my GTI needs that 4.8 liter engine of that 1966 Mustang to perform.

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Very interesting!

And what’s your take on the different M1 Pro core levels available? 8 core sufficient?

I’d go for the 10-core CPU on principle—you never know when multithreading or just lots of apps make the extra cores useful.

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Video & audio, including outdoor. Any kind of graphic production, including packaging, signage. Multi user databases, especially those that are shared among states and continents. Animation and video game development and usage. Ad tracking and serving. Inventory management, including warehousing, inventory, serving, delivering and managing orders, analytics. Complex accounting and taxation issues, along with other number crunching tasks, including large scale databases and approvals/, rejections and editing. Workflow and task tracking. Transportation and delivery management.

This is just off the top of my head; I’ll bet there’s a whole lot more.

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Interestingly, I would make the same argument for RAM. If you’re keeping a lot of apps (or browser tabs) open at once, you’re going to want the RAM to support them all. Even if the system has great storage performance, a lot of swapping is never good for flash memory.

But an excess of CPU cores will only help if those background tasks are actively doing something. For typical office/browsing tasks, they will probably be mostly idle.

But in either case, it’s really a matter of future-proofing your investment. We have no idea what kind of resources apps will require in 3, 5 or 7 years. By getting something overpowered today, it means you (hopefully) will get an extra few years out of it before you have to upgrade. And since you can’t swap any internal components in the future, you want to get the most you can afford when you make the initial purchase.

At least for CPU cores and RAM. For storage, an external SSD, although not as fast as the internal storage, will probably perform good enough for most people.

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In one final bit of listening to users, Apple dropped the much-maligned (or at least poorly leveraged) Touch Bar in favor of traditional F-keys.

Function keys. F-keys (or FKEYS) are Command-Shift-3 and Command-Shift-4.

Totally agreed. Unified memory is kind of magic right now, and the faster memory bandwidth is amazing, but I’d still go for 32 GB. With memory, you can at least see what your current Mac is doing. On my 2020 Intel iMac, I have 40 GB but I’m using only 32 GB right now (so going to 64 GB probably wouldn’t make any difference, even though it’s a different memory setup). And on my M1 MacBook Air, I have 16 GB and am using 14 GB. I’ve never noticed any memory-based slowdowns, but if 32 GB had been an option, I would have gotten it.

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